Quotes About Actors

Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative that reveals (as by the divine light of illumination) the predestined arc of our days. This is no small gift. With it we can neutralize all but the greatest losses, reduce even the greatest bastards to nothing more than bit actors in the drama of our lives, put on this earth for the sole purpose of forwarding our cause. Blessed are those who can believe their own stories.

The comedians I liked were Bill Cosby and Steven Wright, like just always as a comedic actor. I always liked Gary Larson, who's really funny for a cartoonist, obviously.

It was funny on '24' because I'm a Scots-Canadian, and I was working with the great Scottish actor Tony Curran, and we were both playing Russian gangsters.

I think the best comedic actors don't play it for comedy, they play it for reality. Then you find it funny because it's real. Playing the genre is the worst thing you can do - it's embarrassing.

The three main leads [in Townies] were Lauren [ Graham] and Jenna [Elfman] and Molly [Ringwald], and then Ron Livingston was on it as well. There was a lot of people to write funny stuff for.

It's funny, but three of my early films were with Liam Neeson, before Liam Neeson was a big star.

I always found it really funny when actors would come offstage, smoking cigarettes and swearing at each other.

I always find it funny when I watch actors talking about, "I chose to do this part." A lot of times it's you're lucky to get the job. We're like, "Thank you so much."

It's so funny, actors usually have a directing ambition. I've got no ambition for directing.

There are a lot of really funny guys who are very natural in what they do: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Seth Rogen.

We writers dream of a future where actors are mostly computer generated and their performances can be adjusted, by us, on a laptop, alone.

God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

Hollywood is where they shoot too many pictures and not enough actors.

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.

James Cagney, Steve McQueen, I loved all those guys. I grew up loving the movies but had no desire to be in them.

When most dullards hear the words 'the theater,' they envision a twelve-screen multiplex where disaster porn entertains the culturally witless for 90 minutes at a time. Pfaugh. The word 'theater' has grandeur. Power. Back to its ancient Grecian origins, it means 'the seeing place.' A stage upon which actors and actresses use fiction to show us truths.

A lot of the old movie stars couldn't act their way out of a box of wet tissue paper, but they were successful because they had distinctive personalities. They were predictable brands of breakfast cereal: on Wednesdays we had Quaker Oats and Gary Cooper; on Fridays we had Wheaties and Clark Gable. They were off-the-shelf products you expected always to be the same, actors and actresses with likable personalities who played themselves more or less the same role the same way every time out.

If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.

However, by 1990, at the latest, the Clausewitzian framework was beginning to show serious cracks. As has just been said, it proved incapable of incorporating warfare by, or against, non-state actors.

But surely clients will know? Aren't clients rational actors with clear demands? No.

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts . . .

Whoa," I say. "Look how tall he is." "Actors are always midgets in person," says Brandon, "But writers...they're giants.

The history of ideas matters because ideas make actors out of human beings, and they make actors out of us precisely insofar as they occupy this open, uncontrollable, and inherently unlimited universe of explanations, not the stultifying dogma of a supposed conceptual scheme, not the inert, always epiphenomenal utterances we call doctrines or first principles.

We are not spectators of a closed history; we are actors in an open history, our praxis introduces the element of construction rather than knowledge as an ingredient of the world, making the world not simply an object of contemplation but something to be transformed. What we cannot imagine is a consciousness without a future and a history with an end. Thus, as long as there are men, the future will be open and there will only be a probabilistic calculation and no absolute knowledge.